


A Quiet Thing

by Lavanya_Six



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Origin Story, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 17:12:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5464475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavanya_Six/pseuds/Lavanya_Six
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ben takes his first step into a darker world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Quiet Thing

Ben Solo is sitting on a hillside overlooking the temple grounds. A foggy haze clouds the lower-lying areas. Even the horizon is obscured. Ben won't be able to see the dawn today. That's fine. Ben doesn't come here for the sights. Here and there, in the breaks in the cloud cover, he spots rich purples and pinks, but the great bulk of the sky is muted. Dull. A day with few bright spots ahead. More rain, probably. It's the season for it. 

Ben closes his eyes at the thought of another day trapped inside the temple, alone among strangers that know him. His parents are war heroes. His uncle is Master Skywalker himself. Ben's stomach twists at the thought of Uncle Luke. Always, more tutoring. Always, a kind word. Always concerned. 

And why shouldn't he be?

The Force is strong in Ben's family. His mother has it, even if she never trained. His uncle has it, and won the Galactic Civil War half-trained and acting on instinct. His grandfather...

The Force is strong in Ben's family, but not him. 

_I have too much of my father in me,_ a voice whispers. Ben is tired of hushing it. The whisper is proven right every time he struggles to levitate stones, every time he slinks from the dueling circles covered in bruises from staff strikes, every time he struggles to interpret the hokey-sounding parables from the Jedi holocrons. Yet even all those things put together aren't enough to leave him struggling to sleep in his monastic cell, its candle light and thin mattress so different from Ben's plush family apartment on cosmopolitan Coruscant.

The absolute worst thing is that he's not even bad enough to be a failure. 

He's... okay.

A solid, mid-ranking duelist. Never the last to be picked for sparring (but never first). Decent in debates. He will never be a philosopher like his fellow padawan Arik, and he fears he will never make Master, but the foundational concepts are crystalized in his mind. Ben can intuit what passages his classmates have skimmed through from their questions, if only because he's memorized all the texts after re-reading them so many times. His every achievement is hard-won, but none are impressive. 

Unc—Master Skywalker trusts him among several others to help instruct the younglings. It's no insult. He knows the material. He knows people, from the outside. At a glance, he can tell from the way they run on the playground which younglings are from pampered backgrounds — ( _"Like you,"_ the voice sneers.) — and which grew up hearing the sound of blaster fire. Master Skywalker says Ben understands others because he knows himself so well. 

Ben thinks that's a polite way of saying he spends too much time inside his own head.

In the distance, the temple bells boom. Ben should be hurrying to the communal hall, but he doesn't need to do the math in his head to know that he's already tarried for too long. He'll come in late. People will stare. Sometime today or tomorrow, Master Skywalker will have a kind word.

Ben's trembling fingers clench into fists.

He closes his eyes. "There is no emotion, there is peace."

The first line of the mantra of the Jedi Code. Ben has recited it countless times. He has drilled younglings on it. He has participated on endless, tedious seminars about the nuances of the entire text. But to him, to his shame, they have always been just words.

Ben forces his fists open. He reaches for the light saber on his belt, to give his hands something to be occupied by. Once ignited, the blade hums just beside his cheek. A mere flick in the wrong direction and it'd all be over for him. _I'd bet they be really sorry,_ Ben thinks, but then bitterly chides himself. _I bet they'd all think I skewered myself by accident._

An exhalation rattles out. "There is no emotion, there is... peace."

It's irrational, but all at once he _hates_ his family for ending the war, ending any chance for glory or fame. Because, really, what would his family have been without wartime? His uncle would have lived and died a moisture farmer. His mother would have been the pampered aristocrat she feigned being back when she still served as a Rebel spy in the Imperial Senate. Even his father — well, his father was and is a jumped-up spice smuggled who crossed the Hutts too many times, but he would have never met the people that bailed him out of that mess if not for the war. Who among his classmates could Ben count on to help him out of such a scrape, not because of their duty as a Jedi but just because they called him friend?

Ben has no droid armies to battle, no Death Stars to blow up.

Maybe he does have a touch of his uncle and grandfather in him after all, because Ben can see a vision of his future. It's identical to his past. It stretches out before him, with no change and no hope. He will always and forever only be what he is now. 

No one special.

The scream _explodes_ out of him. Ben's light saber lashes out like wild beast, striking a nearby tree. The thing topples over. He doesn't stop hammering the burning stump. There is no serenity within him when Ben reaches out with the Force, picks up the twenty meter long trunk, and _hurls it_ deep into the forest, smashing it and several other trees to matchsticks.

The sight is like cold water thrown in Ben's face. He just stops and stares, slowly catching his ragged breath. He extinguishes his saber and stares at his motionless off-hand. Ben has never come anywhere near closing to lifting something that large.

_How...?_


End file.
